Today should have been the day of her baptism. But instead of being dunked in the cool water of the church’s baptismal, Police Chief Tess O’Rourke coughed, eyes squinted and burning because of the hot smoke swirling everywhere. She wore a nose and mouth mask, but it barely helped. A lightning strike fire was raging. Half of Rogue’s Hollow was under a mandatory evacuation order.

She hopped back in her patrol vehicle as the Coopers, the second-to-last holdout family on this rural road she was evacuating, grabbed their kids and a dog, climbed into their truck, and reluctantly left their property. The husband, Garrett Cooper, wanted to stay and defend the home, and he’d slowed Tess down considerably, eating into her margin of safety.

“The house is a hundred years old—we can’t just leave it!”

“Garrett, the house can be replaced, possessions can be replaced—your life can’t be.” Tess tried to reason with him and got nowhere. It was Janie refusing to leave without him that finally worked to change his mind. Tess witnessed a tense fight between the pair that ended when Cooper recognized that his wife wasn’t going anywhere without him. And fighting to save a hundred-year-old structure on two wooded and brush-choked acres, with the wind driving the flames this way, was foolhardy to say the least. Finally common sense won out. The only way he’d save his brand-new pickup was to drive it out with his family in it.

Even now, in spite of helicopter and plane water drops, Tess could see the flames swirling and consuming on a seemingly unstoppable march. They were off to her left now, roughly behind Arthur Goding’s place, and the wind was driving them along the ridge of hills that bracketed the boundaries of Rogue’s Hollow. Arthur had left his home without argument, taking his dog and loading his livestock into a large trailer.

“Have to trust this all to the Lord,” he’d said.

The property next to Arthur’s, a onetime pot farm, was vacant, so no worries there. Nearly everyone else, including Bart Dover, who owned the property at the end of the road, had already evacuated as well. Dover’s farm was at the western boundary of Rogue’s Hollow. He hadn’t wanted to wait or to take a chance, so he left with his family at the first sign of trouble. Tess wished everyone had been so easy. There was one last resident Tess had not been able to contact—at the end of Juniper, a gravel road that cut south, between here and the Dover place. Fighting with Garrett Cooper had put Tess on the razor’s edge of danger; the safe time cushion the fire captain had given her was expiring.

“Edward-1.” The radio crackled with her call sign.

Tess yanked off the mask to answer. “Edward-1, copy.”